Didier Illouz
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Bio
Born in 1974, the French photographer Didier Illouz lives and works in Marseille. He has taken part to many collective and personal exhibitions in France, and along with other prizes, he was finalist in 2009 at the International Concourse of the magazine Photo. Libération has written about him in August 2008. Didier studied natural sciences, and then image & sound at the University Aix-Marseille. Here he presents two projects, Any-Males and Low-Fi, which merge together both his interests in the natural world and in the images of fancy. The results are different impressive hybrid portraits, which have human, but at the same time animal and monstrous features. Didier Illouz invite us to catch the anthropological and imaginative roots of our identities, going beyond the differences between poetry and science, and reflecting this possible unity in an extra-ordinary metamorphosis’ physiognomic.
Work
According to Friedrich Nietzsche, «there are no facts, only interpretations», and Didier Illouz brings this paradoxical truth in the hearth of the seemingly unquestionable reality of the identity: in the portrait of human visages. Merging together influences from sculpture, painting and cosmetic surgery, but also from Ted Browning and Robert Demachy, Didier transforms the faces he works upon, into something different from what they are in everyday life. Nevertheless, the result of his art is not a simple staging of subjects, because the same subjects, in their “natural” conditions, require such kind of transformation into a difference, into a monstrous actuality, into a deformed representation. For Didier Illouz, human faces are the raw material which has to be caught in the movement of its constituent change. The artist’s glance is not mimetic of any unchangeable reality outside itself: appearing to other people is not a fact, but a work, and photography has exactly the not-naturalistic task of making explicit this movement inside things themselves. In other words: the portrait is true when it’s not slavishly faithful to reality, that is, when it is low fi.
